Excellence

And the Problem with Deals with the Devil

Before all of the injections, one thing I could do was kick. Sit back and pounce: that would have been my style. But now that most of my fast-twitch had been converted to slow-twitch, it wouldn't work.

I waited another mile, then took the lead. Before the race, my coach and I had set a target pace, but the pack had been slower than expected, so I knew I had to be faster now. The question was how much.

Within a couple laps, I'd dumped half of the pack, but there were still five left. On the backstretch, I looked up at the big television screen at one end of the stadium and saw myself, closely shadowed by an Ethiopian who'd won last year's world championship and two other guys who'd been here before.

I picked it up again with six laps to go, then again with four, and except for the world champion, the others started to drop off.

Then, with two laps to go, the Ethiopian started to push back.

This was an old game, and I'd always been good at it. Once I passed someone, they stayed passed. But now it didn't work. The Ethiopoian pushed harder and when I tried to return the favor, nothing happened. I still managed to stave him off until the last lap, but then he went around me like I was standing still, followed shortly by the other two. If anything, I was slowing down.

I finished totally spent ... and fifth. My coach was livid. "What the hell did you think you were doing? First you let yourself get sucked into a slow, tactical duel you can't win, then you take off like a scared rabbit." He drew a big, theatrical sigh, probably trying to remember his own advice about it just being a race. "OK, live and learn. But you ran that thing like a damn teenager."

Knox appeared, and for once he wasn't beaming. "That," he said, "wasn't my fault." Then he turned on his good leg and clomped off.

My coach stared at him, then at me. Belatedly, I wondered why Knox walked with a cane, and what, if anything, my coach knew of it. Was Kringle making his own vicarious effort to redress nature's inequities? Even the devil, I guess, has his reasons.

A week later, my coach resigned. Kringle got me a new one and the next year I took bronze at the worlds, edging the Ethiopian who'd beaten me at the Olympics. But I was fading. Humans, rats ... apparently we reacted similarly to Kringle's ministrations.

The trail to Angel's Rest isn't long, but I nearly put it off too long. At my prime, I could have popped up it in 30 minutes, barely breaking a sweat. This time it took two hours, and I'd never have made it without a walking stick. But the summit was everything I remembered: a big flat slab of rock, looking straight down on the mile-wide river. Below, a freeway hugged the headland, the monotonous drone of trucks audible even from here. A train rumbled a deeper bass, while downstream, a barge plowed a V-wake through sun-glinted water. Everywhere, it seemed, people were on the move.

Unlike the old days, when this was my private retreat, my brother had come up here with me, in case I needed assistance or (the unspoken fear), rescue.

The only surviving member of my immediate family (we Morgans aren't a long-lived tribe), he'd been the one part of my old life I'd insisted on retaining. But at Kringle's insistence, I'd never let him far into my new life. Mostly, it was easy. He wasn't much of a sports fan, and while I couldn't hide my new name and appearance, I'd just told him I'd done it at a sponsor's request. Not that it mattered: My brother is very much of the don't-ask/don't-tell persuasion.

In my rock-star-dreaming days, he'd wanted to play bass to my lead. Two years older but 20 years more passive, he'd never claimed to resent our never-was stardom. Still, he'd remained in music, and was now a high school band teacher.